Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire. José Manuel prieto

of the tide of images coming at me, so I went back to open that door and was struck by bursts of sentences, the music (a Greek melopoeia) of the place, and heard clearly: “Two octopus in ink for table five,” and there in front of me stood the person who had turned to shout (I had seen it a second before: the mouth appearing over the shoulder, opening, yelling, the vein in the neck distending—all of which was captured by my ears after a slight delay and subsequently deciphered by my speech centers as an order that this man, the waiter, was shouting to the kitchen).

      The crystal bead crashed against the nacreous shell one last time. As if awakening from a dream, I saw the mocking face of Diodore (Diodo), the Greek, and knew I was in the restaurant with the bay window, and I ordered: “A beer. Dark. Draft.”

      I had stopped at this restaurant many times. I had spent hours reading letters, copying sentences, whole paragraphs, with the secret hope that if I repeated those words written one, two hundred years ago (and more), my hand would acquire the skill of the ancients. I hoped, for example, to acquire a sense of freedom by copying a passage from Petrarch, describing the ascent of Mount Ventoux, from a letter dated April 26, 1351, into the reply I was starting to draft, sitting in the bay window of the restaurant, looking down on Livadia. The Faustian impulse, the craving for travel of this “first modern man”: “Inspired only by a desire to contemplate the lofty elevation of the place, I have today climbed the highest mount in the region, known, not without cause, as Windy … I stood astonished and overwhelmed by the vast panorama and by the unusual breeze that was blowing …”

      I too was “astonished and overwhelmed by the vast panorama” from the Greek restaurant high above Livadia, the spot on the globe I had chosen to see. V.’s letters completely altered this setting. Instead of a simple nature preserve (for yazikus butterflies) I now saw beeches, oaks, cypresses—a row of tall cypresses marking the end of the gentle slope on my left—and the harbor in Yalta, boats anchored there, boulevards running down toward the sea. The octopus I impaled on a broad fork with large tines and raised to my lips came from this very sea. I chewed it slowly, its thick sauce spreading an oily cloak over my taste buds.

      With my back to the little restaurant where Diodo was moving between the tables, I leaned over the balustrade and studied the afternoon light, just a hint of the shadow of the hour floating in it: the rays of sun slanting through the clouds and growing shorter, the pyramids of poplars growing less sharp, withdrawing slowly into a larger darkness in which it was impossible to distinguish the branches, their foliage dissolving into a green-blue mass. It wasn’t that everything had become obscured (it was far from totally obscured), no, the initial change here was just as fast as a nightfall farther south, but then a brighter twilight lingered as long as another five hours, with the sun hanging a few meters above the sea.

      I rested in my room for a few hours. It was already dark, but for me a good night began at midnight, when no light at all filtered through the curtains. I surveyed the garden in front of the pension, leaning over the rail around the veranda, toward the beech trees in the distance, my eyes wide open, pupils dilated in the low frequency light, infrared. In the painfully harsh light of day, I could not help noting the differences between Crimea and the outskirts of Stockholm, for one example. During the day I registered every detail with my eyes half-closed, hidden like some bird’s behind a double eyelid (or the lace-curtain shutter of a camera), the disk of the sun suspended in a deep blue sky, the bright colors of the bikinis on the beach. I had lived in the north for years, traveling in geographic zones, regions that received less light for most of the year, but more rain and snow, often visiting cities where it snowed as late as May, Stockholm, for example; if I was going there in May, I would certainly take my warmest overcoat, wear it when I left St. Petersburg, to board the train in the Finland Station, and then keep it near me in the luggage rack, so I could put it back on in Helsinki, to board the ferry to Stockholm. I would open it when I got inside, in the glassed-in cabin, pulling the zipper down without taking my eyes off the black rocks along the coast, the dark cold water, the gray sky, good indications of a northern country, no palm trees, no yellow orb throwing thousands of watts on them. A breath of cold air, at last. Yes, I should turn up the collar on my overcoat.

      A trip should be traced beforehand in a traveler’s soul, in a tiny polygon like a Wilson camera, where you can follow the trajectory of an atomic particle, to arrive at the state of satisfaction that awaits on the other shore, the water boiling in the kettle, the sun hidden behind the trees, the bashkir guides chatting quietly a few steps away, in their makeshift stores. Because of the importance of the physical, of skin exposed to the wind and sun through the eyelids. But the mental and spiritual are just as important, the heightened experience that allows us to watch entranced as bubbles rise through liquid, to see the universes contained within their narrow walls. An idea that is elusive and fragile, the wings of a butterfly, a dream. Two dreams winged my feet, speeding my descent from the platform. The first, a Chinese parable, I will not repeat, as it is commonplace; the second, maybe less so. (I felt so alive throwing my knapsack onto the luggage rack, drinking homemade liquor with the chance companions on my trip, some Cossacks from Zaporoshets, wrapped in red kerchiefs, just a masquerade for the weekend; it’s true, but so what?)

      A man travels to the past like a light ray, cutting through time as easily as a hot knife though butter, as cleanly as night-vision goggles penetrate the darkness. That ray lights the part of the Jurassic forest he is moving through. The traveler can’t leave the path, can’t join the flutter of birds and butterflies on either side, it is forbidden. But he happens to stumble and accidentally steps on a butterfly. That’s all he does. Returning to the present he discovers that his momentary interruption has not only had unfortunate consequences for the trampled butterfly—its death—but he has come back to a very different world, which has spun far off its previous orbit. We cannot know the position and spin of an electron (or a butterfly, in this case) at any given moment—I knew that when I decided to go to Astrakhan. I trampled on the order in my life more and more often, straying farther from the path each time: the Caspian Basin, for example, was almost on the complete opposite side of the earth from my birthplace. Even if nothing had made me think I would wake up someday believing I were a butterfly dreaming it was a man, I still have to worry about breaking some law and getting stuck here, alone on the delta of the Volga River, on an island swamped by a rising tide, slipping and sliding into outer space, penetrating the night like a sounding device that was sent out to photograph Venus, or a few hundred kilometers of its surface, the Venusian seas, obtaining images of unsurpassed beauty and then going too far, and unable to correct its course, flying over Saturn, beyond all hope, to discover more heaps of dust, new rings, all useless, all destined to be lost to the world and its people, to be swallowed up forever in the galactic night. As I passed across Istanbul, V. saw my solitude, and I was saved, caught by the heavy mass of a woman who drew me with the full gravitational force of her belly dance, her omphalic wisdom. The letters she sent me were like new directions, page after page, the binary sequence I needed to correct my course.

      Why had I traveled to Stockholm (and then later to Istanbul)? To get rich. Inspired by base instincts yet again—I should write that down, to explain to V., and to myself, how I had arrived at that table in the café in Istanbul. The account I gave of my travels at that time was quite brief and largely false. Now I could describe them in detail, scrupulously, like an eye following the sinuous Cufic writing on the doors of some Tartar houses (the Tartars from Khanato in Crimea) here in Livadia. In her second letter she told me about her trip back: how she traveled across Russia to get home, how her mother clapped her hands to her cheeks, speechless with amazement. I should begin with the trip that brought me to Istanbul, the chain of purchases (and sales); list the transactions that eventually led me to that café by the Saray, the nightclub with exotic dancers and strippers.

      Because before the butterfly business, I had sold glasses for seeing at night (natt kikare, in Swedish). And before that—just to give her a sense of the turbulent atmosphere in Russia at the time—I told her I had laid eyes (and hands) on the skins of Amur tigers, on the endangered species list; the tusks and teeth of mammoths, preserved in the permafrost on the banks of the Liena, in Yakutiya; new antlers from young reindeer (for months my refrigerator held a bottle of blood obtained when the horns were